


seals and secrets

by unicyclehippo



Series: Blue Girls Have The Most Fun [31]
Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-11
Updated: 2020-07-11
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:54:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,104
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25199590
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unicyclehippo/pseuds/unicyclehippo
Summary: prompt: beaujester and secrets/mysteriesor,Beau needs Jester's help as she second-guesses the trust she placed in someone.
Relationships: Jester Lavorre/Beauregard Lionett
Series: Blue Girls Have The Most Fun [31]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1824289
Comments: 4
Kudos: 65





	seals and secrets

Beau makes her way down the staircase like a dropped sack of ball bearings. Her heart and mind knock around inside their chambers, her pulse careens, ricocheting through her system, and thudding _so damn loud_ she’s sure it must have alerted the others. But the Xhorhaus is still and silent, so late into the night—or, what they must assume is late into the night, beneath the constant cover of that constant inky dark—and no one seems to rouse. Certainly, no one comes to question her why it is that they can hear her coming, stumbling down the steps, limbs loose and unattended to—so uncharacteristic of the monk—and knocking heavily against the wooden swirl of the bannister.

The pain of it, hip thudding into the railing, stops Beau there on the landing. She clutches to the wood and scans across the open centre of their home; without her goggles, Beau can see the wide staircase turning out ahead of her and falling steeply away, like steps down into a pool of dark water. The rest of the second-floor hugs the outside of this landing—Yasha’s room, and the war room and happy room side-by-side, the room Nott and her husband share set a little further away behind those. Beau’s own room is a few doors away and for a moment, she stares blankly at it. Seeing, but not seeming to register it. Her brain feels _stuck_ , stuck on the one thought that keeps tripping through her mind over and over and over, and any new thought that threatens it—even so minor a thought as _walk_ and _go downstairs_ and _get Jester_ —takes a few seconds longer to hit, a few seconds longer for Beau to act on them.

It takes a minute but she stumbles to her room. Their room, the one she shares with Jester. The other girl is asleep in her bed, curled tight in her blankets. For a moment, Beau stands over her and just watches a curl of blue-black hair flutter as Jester breathes out. Settles when she breathes in. Flutters, another breath out. The pace of it is slow and steady and Beau feels her heart rate settle.

‘Jester.’ Nothing. ‘Jester,’ Beau calls again, her voice a low, hoarse whisper. ‘I need you to wake up.’ The girl doesn’t shift, so Beau kneels beside her bed and sets a careful hand on her shoulder. Shakes, gently. ‘Jester?’

She comes awake then with a snuffling snort and a spasm, leg kicking out and tangling more in the sheets. Her head falls from where it had been pillowed on her arm.

‘What’s wro – ow- _wuh_ , I hate pins and needles,’ Jester complains, words a little slurred from sleep. She pulls her arm across her chest, massaging, kneading blood back into it. Her eyes slide and slip to Beau, kneeling at her side, and she stops; her hand falls down toward her, fingers uncurling as she reaches toward her. ‘Beau? Are you – ’ A great yawn cuts her off. ‘You okay?’

Beau shakes her head. She can’t see Jester’s face when the other girl sits up, blocking the light from the window. Not when the world to her is all layers upon layers of black. Everything she sees—Jester’s silhouette, the outline of the bed, her own hands—the dark, the shadows, cast it all flat and shallow, like shadow puppets against a screen. She doesn’t take Jester’s hand, instead balls her own hands into fists against her knees and presses them into the soft of her thighs.

‘I need you,’ Beau tells her. ‘Are you – can you scry? Do you have that prepared?’

She can’t see Jester’s face; she doesn’t need to see it to hear the worry, hear the heavy frown in Jester’s voice.

‘Yah, I can scry. Beau… Is everything…okay?’

Beau bows her head. Still knelt at Jester’s bedside, and with the world so flat and dark as it is, it feels like she hardly moves at all to drop her head low, press her forehead to the thin mattress of Jester’s bed. Like the dark rises up cool to meet her. After a moment, she feels Jester’s hand on the back of her neck. A cool, careful finger curls into the free wisps of hair there, traces over her faintly shimmering tattoo.

‘No,’ Beau whispers. The thought, the question, ticks over and over and _over_ in her mind. Refuses to leave her. Stretches her mind to its limits as it ticks over every path, every encounter they’ve had, every untrustworthy foe or friend-in-disguise, every monster and hanging thread, hanging _chain._ It all gets louder with each passing moment until the volume of it _screaming_ in her head can’t get louder so it hurts instead, presses at her temples, at her teeth, makes her grind them hard. ‘I think,’ she grits out, a hand reaching up to knock against her own head and she forces it down, forces it to tangle into soft sheets, ‘if I’m right, I think we’re in a lot of trouble. And I don’t _want_ -’

‘Okay. Okay.’

Jester bends low over her. With her eyes closed, Beau’s mind doesn’t have to go to the work of translating shadows into near and far, deep and flat. Instead, she _feels_ in perfect clarity the way Jester encompasses her for the moment: the hand sliding low down her back, pressing Beau closer; Jester’s hair toppling down in sweet-smelling curls to knock against Beau’s forehead, her cheek, all around her like a canopy of lavender and a hint of something acrid, the faintest whiff of a burning wick; the kiss she bestows with cool lips, a burning-ice brand, onto Beau’s forehead; the fingers of her other hand that she brings around to twine into Beau’s, closing around jagged knuckles, jutting drawn-white bone, like shipwrecks in the inky dark.

‘Scrying,’ Jester says, and pulls back. She swings her legs out of the bed and hurries around to collect her haversack and the sign of the Traveller, anything else she thinks she might need. She isn’t gone for long. ‘Where do we want to do this? The tree is good.’

Beau jerks. Not a yes, not a no.

‘The training pit?’

‘No. Absolutely not,’ Beau rasps.

‘Where then?’

‘The war room.’

Jester hesitates. ‘Beau,’ she starts. Her voice wavers, about to topple into the question. She bites it back. ‘Okay.’

Beau stands. Her body feels heavy and she stumbles, only to be caught by the elbow by Jester, who helps. Pulls her upright. Up close like this, Beau can vaguely make out Jester’s distress; blue eyes and blue hands search her for any discomfort, any injury, but find nothing. Unhappy, unconvinced, Jester takes Beau’s hand and holds hard enough that Beau knows she shouldn’t try to shake her off. Jester leads the way to the war room.

It’s still as unused as the day they had dubbed it the War Room. A square table sits in its centre, slightly second-hand chairs shoved beneath it. Nine of them, because it had made them laugh. A layer of dust covers everything in the room. Beau runs an eye across the floor before they enter but there is no sign that anyone else had entered, the dust undisturbed. They step in. Beau locks the door behind them.

‘What is this about, Beau?’ Jester asks, even as she begins to set up the ritual. With the room dominated by the table, she hitches up her skirt and drags a chair out, using it to clamber up onto the solid table and sit in its centre. ‘Light, please.’

‘No. No light. If anyone is scrying on us—’

‘They would probably have dark vision,’ Jester points out, grabbing handfuls out from her bag of statuettes and flowers and incense and chalk and shards of crystal and her sketchbook, of course. She stops with it in her lap when Beau doesn’t move, and she smiles over at her. ‘I need to see the ritual circle.’

‘Right. Right,’ Beau mutters. She moves to the wall, lifting off the lantern and coaxing the small, green-tinged light within it to brightness. The light is faint but enough for Jester to see by as she arranges the components according to her instruction.

‘So. Who am I looking for?’ she asks, putting the final touches into the chalk circle she’s drawn as she sits cross-legged within it. ‘Beau? I need someone to look for. Or a really specific place.’

Shoving a hand deep into her pocket, Beau hesitates. Then removes a small square of cloth. A simple handkerchief. It is smeared with blood, Jester can see when it comes into the radius of her light.

‘That helps, right? The blood?’

‘I mean, it depends,'

‘If something belongs to the person you’re scrying on,’ Beau clarifies, tone borderline impatient. ‘That helps you focus, or something?’

‘Yeah, yes.’

‘Okay. Great. Here.’ Beau shoves the cloth toward her, pushes it into Jester’s hand.

‘Who—’

‘Dairon.'

Jester frowns up at Beau. ‘Are you worried she’s been captured or something?’

Beau’s face is tight, angular with worry. ‘No. I’m worried they’re working against us.’

‘Dairon? Your mentor? Cool elf monk? No, there’s no way – ’

‘Every time they say they have new information for us, Dairon gave us the _smallest_ bit possible,’ Beau interrupts. She rubs at her eyes, feels the pounding in her head start to slam again. ‘They say they know where the beacon went, but no paper trail. They say they can get information from the monastery, but nothing yet. They tell us they had close shaves here, but nothing found them.’

‘You don’t believe them?’

‘I _can’t_ believe her. That’s the thing about _cults_ ,’ Beau hisses. ‘They find useful people everywhere and twist them, turn them around until the secret of the cult is so hidden it becomes the core of who they are. The _one secret_ to keep from everyone else. She gave us _nothing_ useful – not really.’

‘But she told us about Vence – ’

‘She knew who he was, sure, but we don’t know if that was planned. If he's stopped being useful all of a sudden, they could use him as bait, as a - a scapegoat. And then Dairon wanted to organise a meeting for me, for us, with the King. Not _her_ meeting the King— _us._ What if she tells the King we're the ones behind it all. Or if the meeting isn't with him at all and it's just a cover.’ Beau looks up from the table to meet Jester’s worried eyes. ‘I know it sounds mad,’ Beau says quietly. It is loud enough, in this abandoned room. ‘Like I’m jumping at shadows. Like I’m being paranoid. But _please_ , Jes—I need you to look. If she’s trying to use me—I gave her my _seal_ ,’ Beau admits, voice cracking. ‘I trusted her, I told her everything we’d learned, I gave her my seal—I put _all of us_ in danger so I need to know, I _need_ to know how badly I fucked up this time.’ Lungs seizing with the worry, with the flood of words, Beau forces herself to take a calming breath. It fills her. Funnels out with a concentrated breath. She drags in another. Braces against the table, head hanging low between her shoulders. ‘There’s this feeling,’ she tells Jester after a moment, voice pressed flat and clean of emotion. ‘An itch. All over. Like there’s something I’m _missing_. I gotta know, Jes,’

‘Okay. Okay, Beau, it’s okay. I’ll help.’ Jester settles in her scrying circle. She pulls her hand back from where it had been hanging in mid-air, reaching out toward Beau. Folding the bloodied cloth—Dairon’s blood, a trophy from a wound Beau had inflicted for exactly this purpose?—into her hand, Jester clutches it tight and grasps her talisman in her other hand.

Power crackles into the world around her, the wood beneath her. It smells of burning spices—cinnamon, nutmeg—and of sugar and salt, the heavy scents of paint and perfume, all manner of odours mixing that Beau would never have thought could work together but somehow do, mixing into a powerful, almost overwhelming wall of scent in the room that had smelled of nothing but dust and a faint chill to the air. Jester’s eyes close and then open again, awash with faint green light as she stares into some distant image. She cocks her head slightly, as though listening to someone speak in her ear, and then smiles.

‘We’re looking for someone,’ she says in answer to a question Beau can’t hear. ‘Their name is Dairon.’


End file.
